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  In any case, they were old friends meeting up for a chat. What was wrong with that?

  It struck him now that he had been stupidly naïve.

  The sedan had stopped alongside him, the motor humming with suppressed power. The front seat passenger had stepped out and slammed him against the wall before punching him with vicious force in the stomach. Arash dropped the bag of fruit and curled away from his attacker, a heavy man in plain clothes, feeling a rain of blows descending on his head and back, and a heavy blow from another man hitting him in the kidneys. He felt his knee split on a piece of stone as he fell to the ground, and wondered if this was to end here.

  ‘What are you doing? Why are you? What—?’ He tried to protest, even though he knew it was useless. Protests of innocence were all he had left, but they never worked with such people, who only knew everybody as guilty, if not in deed then by intent. The men continued their beating without saying a word, their breathing growing heavier as they spent their energy in the growing heat of the sun, punching and kicking him with almost casual detachment as if he were no more than a punch bag in a gymnasium.

  Then he was grabbed by his arm and spun around to face the car. He immediately saw the face of his friend Farshad staring out at him from the back seat. For just a second Arash felt a flood of relief. At least Farshad wasn’t hurt; there were no signs of violence, no bruising or bloodshed, no face like death. That was good, surely …

  Then he realized that Farshad was smiling. And he knew he was finished.

  The two men dragged him across the sidewalk and threw him into the back alongside Farshad. But he couldn’t even look at the man he’d once valued; the friend who had espoused the same anti-government beliefs as himself and talked often of how he wanted to get out of the country to America, where he could begin a new and exciting life.

  For Arash the betrayal was too much to bear and he tried to shrink away until one of the men jumped in after him and elbowed him aside.

  There were three men in the car apart from himself and Farshad: the two who had attacked him and the driver. None of them spoke, although the one sitting next to him kept using his elbow, striking him viciously in the side of the head for no reason other than that it seemed to be something to do.

  It was the silence that scared him most. If they had raged at him, spat on him, accused him of being a traitor and a criminal, threatened him with certain death, it would have been easier to take. But this wordless violence was the most frightening of all, in that it carried no message.

  As the car pulled away and accelerated, he caught a last blurred glimpse of the outside world, his bag of fruit spilled across the sidewalk and already of interest to one of the many dogs roaming the neighbourhood. He assumed the driver was heading towards the expressway, no doubt on their way to MOIS headquarters where he would disappear, like so many others had done before him. He sank down in the seat, trying to control his bladder and wondering what would happen to his sister and brother, now his only living family who had a house far to the south of Tehran. Would they also be dragged in, bruised and beaten, victims of his desire to make a difference in the country, later to disappear? Or would they simply never hear from him again and be left forever wondering at his fate?

  The driver and the front seat passenger were talking quietly and smoking, the air heavy with harsh tobacco fumes and adding to the stale smell of perspiration and unwashed clothing. Farshad and the man alongside him were silent, each looking out at the passing scenery.

  The journey was surprisingly brief. Arash looked up. They were nowhere near the MOIS headquarters, but turning into a wide street in a quiet commercial district not far from where he had been picked up.

  He looked around and felt his stomach flip. He knew of this place; he’d seen and read of people being taken here into a compound located at the far end of this street, never to emerge.

  It was a place of death.

  He moaned softly, earning another sharp elbow dig from the guard. The passenger in the front seat turned his head to say something, but was interrupted by the driver, who cursed and slowed sharply.

  A couple had made to step into the road maybe thirty metres ahead. The man was nondescript, dressed in a dark jacket and tan pants. Alongside him was a slim figure in a long dress and a scarf covering her head, being supported by the man’s arm.

  ‘Drive on!’ the passenger snapped. ‘Let them wait. We don’t have time.’

  The driver shrugged and hit the horn, and the heavy car surged forward, visibly possessing its space on the road as a warning. As it did so, the man on the sidewalk stepped back a pace and watched it approach.

  Just before the car drew level, the man hurled the woman into the road.

  Someone inside the vehicle screamed like a girl, and Arash wondered if it had been himself. There was a loud bang as the woman’s body surged over the radiator grill and bounced off the windshield, shutting out the sunlight for a brief moment. Then she was gone, leaving her scarf snagged on the radio aerial and snapping in the wind like a pennant.

  The passenger cursed. A single finger was trapped behind one of the wiper arms and pointing accusingly at them all.

  The driver swore repeatedly and stamped hard on the brakes, throwing them all forward and ignoring the other man’s orders to drive on regardless. Alongside Arash, Farshad had doubled over, striking his head on the back of the front seat and was now throwing up in the footwell. The guard on his other side was swearing and reaching for the gun at his waist.

  Then the rear passenger door was flung open and a figure appeared. It was the man in the dark jacket. He was holding a pistol with a large bulbous shape over the end of the barrel, and Arash noticed that the ground around his feet was scattered with fragments of pale plastic; an arm, a foot and part of a leg. And rolling into the gutter was a head with the empty, sightless eyes of a mannequin.

  The man shot the armed guard once in the head, then pulled Arash out of the car, before turning to fire with absolute calm three more times into the interior.

  The engine died and was silent.

  ‘Come,’ the man said urgently, and hustled Arash away to a small car parked back down the street. They climbed in and the man drove away, steering into a maze of streets until they were lost to any possible pursuit. As they drove up a ramp on to the expressway and joined a mass of other traffic, Arash finally found his voice.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said weakly. ‘Who are you? Where are we going?’

  ‘I was sent by Langley,’ the man said, and smiled. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a passport and a driver’s licence, which he handed to Arash. ‘Remember that name; it’s yours until we get out of this country.’

  THREE

  I’m a close protection specialist. I run security, evaluate risks in hostile situations and, where needed, provide hard cover. To do my job I have to look ahead of where a principal is going to be at any time, checking details, terrain, routes in and out – most especially out – and providing the best possible solution for a happy outcome. If it works the principal won’t even know I’m there and will go home happy. If it doesn’t, I get involved.

  Which is where the hard cover comes in; it means I fight back. Like in Tehran.

  Traditional security pros – the kind who wear suits and ties and have those little squiggly wires tucked behind their ears, work up close and personal in teams several operators strong. They cluster tightly around the VIP in a physical screen, their function to display a visible deterrent to a would-be assailant. If attacked, they provide a rapid evacuation exercise and get their VIP out of harm’s way. Mostly it works fine.

  The main problem is if the threat comes from outside the obvious security cordon. And the larger the perimeter, the longer it takes to shut down. By the time the team reacts and mounts a search, especially if the target area is surrounded by tall buildings or raised elevations from where a sniper can calmly take his shot, the VIP is down and the shooter is long gone.
r />   Staying back, I get to see more of what’s going on in the surrounding area. If the principal suddenly becomes a target and I’ve done my job right, I can take preventative action. That might mean snatching him or her up by force if necessary and moving them on. Mostly it comes down to neutralising the threat before they can attack. No fuss, no mess. Well, maybe a little mess.

  Overall, I like to be ahead of the game to see what’s coming. Like in Tehran.

  I pick up most jobs by recommendation. Others I hear about through a loose network of former military personnel, spooks and private security contractors trading information on intelligence or security assignments around the world. I vet as many as I can before making a judgement, but you can’t always be too selective. And I like to work alone.

  The Tehran job had come through a contact in the US intelligence world, a man who’d steered jobs my way on previous occasions. He followed it up pretty quickly with another call a few days after I got back.

  ‘You’re in demand,’ he’d said, when I responded to a message on my voicemail. ‘A certain government agency not a million miles from Washington wants you to ride shotgun on an operation. Level urgent and critical. You interested?’

  He could have been talking about any one of a dozen agencies, all gathered around the seat of government like vultures on road-kill. But I was guessing CIA, since that was the one Arash Bagheri had worked for. Urgent and critical was how they usually operated, and they use private contractors like me. ‘Where to?’

  ‘That hasn’t been specified but if I’m reading the news right, it’s probably somewhere in Europe.’

  Russia. It had to be – or over that way. Where else in the world right now was the focus but on Ukraine and the surrounding states? Where else might the CIA be running an operation requiring an unassigned operative like me?

  By unassigned, read deniable. It’s what they call it when they want to keep their hands clean and their teeth pearly white. If the operator gets caught or blown, he’s on his own. It’s part of the risk in this business.

  I’d worked in central and Eastern Europe before and knew my way around. And I had contacts from previous operations, although how much use they’d be depended on the precise location. Going in cold looking to buy resources is hard work – and risky.

  But, as I was going to find out, using known resources also has its problems.

  Twenty-four hours later I met up with a Clandestine Service Officer named Brian Callahan in a CIA front-office in New York. Urgent and critical was about right. This was fast work and I wondered what had got them in such a spin.

  Callahan was tall and lean and had Langley written all over him. He had cropped grey hair and the eyes of one who’d spent a lot of his time peering around corners and not liking what he saw, but was capable of dealing with it. He seemed relaxed, but I could tell he was wound up tight. A man under pressure.

  ‘That was good work you did in Tehran,’ he’d started out, after we’d been served coffee from a Starbucks down the street and got over assessing each other. ‘Getting Bagheri out of there in one piece was a hell of a feat.’

  ‘You were in on it?’

  ‘I was an observer. It was an important mission. Pity it didn’t get us the information we needed, but at least we – you – saved an important man and got him out alive.’ He looked squarely at me as if trying to get in my head. People in his position do that a lot, I find. ‘You’re a hard man to pin down.’

  I didn’t respond to that. I don’t advertise my services, and few people know where to find me. But those that do are connected and word soon gets down the line. It’s not exactly the Better Business Bureau method but it works well enough for me.

  ‘Have you been watching the news?’ he asked.

  ‘Some. I take it you don’t mean the showbiz segment.’

  The smile didn’t quite work, but he tried. ‘I wish. We’d all make more money and sleep better at night.’ He tapped the desk. ‘I think this is your kind of job. I hope so, anyway. You can pull out of this anytime during the initial briefing – but only up to the point of names, places and times.’

  ‘Which is when?’

  ‘I think you’ll know soon enough. Can we proceed?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  His brief was simple. A foreign policy statement by Secretary of State John Kerry had made it clear that the US would stand by Ukraine during its problems involving pro-Russian separatists and a growing show of non-cooperation from Moscow in spite of talks in Geneva in April 2014 to rectify the situation between them. To that end, the White House had decided that there was a need to talk to the increasingly beleaguered Ukrainians as a show of support. But there were problems with that. In the same way as in Syria, Iran and Egypt during and after the Arab Spring, there were different factions involved, each with their own agenda. It was a nightmare of tactics, diplomacy and judgement, and someone, somewhere was going to end up unhappy.

  In this instance the talks had to be low-level, which meant without any media presence, flexible in nature and ready to ship out at a moment’s notice and run for home if things got hot. Moscow was keeping a close eye on US and European Union involvement so it wasn’t going to be easy.

  ‘It was supposed to be a one-man operation,’ Callahan explained, ‘in and out with the minimum of noise. What the State Department calls “exploratory in nature and designed to move talks forward with various parties to find out who controls who”. What that means is finding a way of leveraging a safe outcome without getting us all involved in a messy civil war – or worse. Once Moscow goes in with all guns blazing, nobody will be able to predict the outcome.’

  ‘What’s the likelihood of that?’ I could guess, I suppose, but it’s always useful hearing an insider spook’s take on world events.

  Callahan played it cute. He prevaricated. ‘Who knows? Our best analysts are still working on it. Putin played hardball with Georgia over South Ossetia, but scaled things back quickly. He might do the same again long enough to gain control elsewhere, but the scenario is not the same. Ukraine is a mix, some pro-Moscow, some against. The country is already divided, and the best outcome is seen by some as a split. It wouldn’t be easy but if it avoids open warfare it would be better than tanks rolling down Main Street, Kiev anytime soon.’

  Good luck with that, I thought. But their intentions were good – on the surface. If the State Department wanted to help cool things down, and they had a man ready and willing to go do this, it was difficult to fault their commitment. How it would turn out was anybody’s guess. Which prompted a question.

  ‘You said this was supposed to be a one-man operation. What did you mean?’

  He hesitated and I got a sudden sense of where the stress was coming from. This wasn’t a plan in the making, something they were sketching out on a mission board; it was a done deal. The train had already left the station. Callahan confirmed it.

  ‘Our man’s already in place, but under house arrest and imminent threat. I need you to go in and pull him out.’

  FOUR

  I did a tour of the room for a couple of minutes while he sat and waited. It was pretty much a dance routine; we both knew we’d reached that point where I either went to the door and walked away, or stayed and listened to a full briefing of names, details, dates and other data. After that I’d be committed.

  What Callahan was describing was not an escort job, but a rescue operation.

  I sat down again.

  The person they’d sent in was a State Department officer with some field experience and a brief career in the military. It was a wise choice – as far as it went. Long-time desk-jockey staffers don’t usually have much of a handle on field action, which can be good and bad. Good means the caution factor keeps them from taking risks; the bad comes when they have a little knowledge or experience and think they can talk their way out of anything.

  My own opinion was that while this negotiator wasn’t expected to get physical, some experience of moving around in h
ostile areas wouldn’t do him any harm. The simple truth was, they’d sent a man to a region where he could be picked up and locked away without warning if he stuck his head down the wrong rabbit hole.

  And by the sounds of it, he’d done just that.

  ‘Where are we talking about?’

  ‘I’ll come to that.’ Callahan took a folder out of a drawer and slid it across the desk. It held a colour photo of a man named Edwin Travis. The career summary told me he was forty-five years old, married with two kids and lived outside Washington D.C. It was almost nothing in real terms, but since we weren’t exactly going to meet up and be best buddies, I didn’t need to know more. Too much unnecessary information would merely cloud the issue and not help me watch over him. All I needed to do was recognize him when I saw him.

  The photo showed a man in apparently good physical condition, with fair hair going thin and close cut at the sides. He had the confident, stern-jawed look of a man who had been out there and done stuff. But photographs lie. I could tell instinctively that he was no action figure, unless it was on the sports field with his kids. My instinctive impression was that it would have been better if he’d looked a little more average. Average is bland; average gets you by almost anywhere in the world and gets overlooked. It’s the confident or brash that gets pulled out of a line-up.

  Callahan must have read my thoughts. ‘We put him through an intensive course in how not to stick his head in a noose, but that was as far as the State Department wanted us to go.’ He gave a cynical smile. ‘I guess they didn’t want him exposed too much to the dark arts, in case he turned rogue on them.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He got through the first round of meetings in Ukraine, gradually working his way around the various groups and their decision-makers, up to the potential leaders of tomorrow. Then two days ago he was a guest at a late-night meeting in the city of Donetsk, in the east. As he was leaving, a bunch of armed men lifted him off the street and took him back to his hotel. They were described as militia – local men in uniforms stolen from a nearby barracks. They didn’t explain why, but told Travis not to leave the building or he’d be shot on sight. He’s been held there ever since.’